INITIAL IDEA: My original thought was to create a p5 or processing sketch with 3 boxes across a canvas with a line of text inside each box (similar to Jenny Holzer’s Truisms or Ben Rubin & Mark Hansen ‘s Listening Posts and using colors inspired by Byron Kim’s Synecdoche). After seeing ICP’s Perpetual Revolution: The Image and Social Change, Thomas Dworzak’s “Instagram books” collection and taking Allison Parrish’s Twitter Bot class, I thought it would be interesting to explore the Twitter API and extract snapshots of tweets associated to particular words. I wanted to take an issue like immigration or skin color and search for particular words like “immigration,” as well as words associated to it like “better life” and “dreams” on the Twitter API and display the tweets in each of the 3 boxes.
DRAFT:
TWITTER 3.9.17 / 11am
PROCESS:
1. In an effort to learn and practice my Processing & P5 skills, I decided to work in this medium as my final project. Since I’m still learning how to code and parsing data, it’s taking me a while to make the code work and look the way I want. The draft above was actually done in Indesign and Photoshop, but I’m determined to code this in p5, so the API or a text file of tweets loads into the canvas automatically.
2. Extracting data from Twitter API. My initial idea was to have 3 panels, flashing different shades of skin tones with twitter feed info of the words: ‘brown’, ‘white’, ‘black’ in the tweets. These particular words are so general that they convey a wide range of meanings from actual color to people’s names, so I decided to change the word search to ‘immigration’ and the things that migrants strive for like ‘second chances’, ‘dreams’, ‘better life’, ‘happiness’ to see more positive tweets. After seeing the results for these word searches, I felt like I needed to filter out a lot of information like retweets, the user’s Twitter name and abundance of mean or negative tweets.
3. Design – 3 boxes of text vs 1 box. It’s probably better to focus on 1 line/ 1 box of text at a time. I also want to add more design elements or more animation to this so it’s something that I need to work on, as well as figuring out the coding for this.
Related
Very interested in the nuances of your decision-making. do we see the words from the search string or just the results that are more enigmatic? The formal presentation really matters as you’d clearly pointed at. Are these monitors when you say boxes? Or projection on cards? I think they each have to feel object-like (IMO). Couple references:
http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/Collection/art-object-page.142289.html
and
http://blog.colourstudio.com/2013/08/human-skin-color-index.html
and
http://www.thecityreview.com/colorcht.html (The Richter work)
Feel free reach out if you want more feedback!